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Here is a better direction, How about the tax payers telling government where to spend the tax dollars they insist we pay them. The system is already there with government revenue collections that they can direct each tax payers funding according to what each tax payers wants their taxes to be spend on.

In other words, know any tax payers who'd not want access to what they pay for?

I'll try to explain it simply:The government finances scientific research, with tax money.That research is conducted by scientists, then other sicentists review the research for flaws, and finally the research is published in scientific journals. Elsevier is the editor of several such journals.

Elsevier and other publishers do not pay scientists who do research and they do not pay the scientists who review the original research either. They don't pay anybody. They only pay the publication of journals (i.e. printing). And then they sell those journals for a very, very expensive sum of money. I don't have the prices, but it's so expensive that only universities buy these journals (even public libraries can't afford them).So Elsevier and other publishers like them make a ton of money through the work of others.

Now get this:The government wanted research that it finances to be available to the public. Your tax money pays for research, therefore you should have access to that research - makes sense, right?Well Elsevier had a problem with that. Publishers such as them try to keep the research for themselves, in order to force universities and public services to buy their journals. So Elsevier pushed the Research Works Act.As the summary says, this act would make it illegal for the government to say "we'll pay for this research, but on the condition that the results are made public". Yes, I know how crazy it sounds but no, there's no mistake.It's like you paying an artist to make a painting, and then being forced to pay a publisher (on top of the artist) in order to receive the painting.

The Federal Research Public Access Act, on the other hand, is a law that makes public access mandatory for research that is financed by the government. It's a good thing. Currently, the government can choose to pay for research without the results being made public. Where do you find the results then? In the journals of Elsevier and co. Why should you pay to see the research your tax money financed? You shouldn't!So that law is a good thing. It would put an end to research paid with tax money but locked away from the public. With that law, if your taxes pay for research, then you get access to it, no exceptions.

On top of giving you what you are owed (i.e. the research you paid for), this law will also help science in general.The premise behind science is that every fact can be checked. You can either do the research yourself, or you can read the papers on the original research. This is important for scientists because if scientist A could not know what scientist B did, science would not advance.However, it is also important that the public be able to access the research. Science is important in society. Take global warming: there's a lot of controversy about it. Maybe it's real, maybe it's a hoax. People should be able to see all the research on it (and I mean the full original research, not a summary), and make their own opinion. Of course understanding all that research requires knowledge and intelligence, but people who wish to look at it should be able to do that. Science is about evidence and proof - science is not "I'm a scientist so believe everything I say!". Having science locked up behind expensive journals forces the public to trust scientists entirely, instead of letting the public study the research and make its own opinion.

And why are expensive scientific journals an issue now? Because of the Internet and advances in computers. Before, these journals had to be printed. If you haven't seen these journals before, trust me, they're huge and there's usually a new one to print each month. Printing costs are high (although nowhere close to the sale price - trust me, the publishers make insane profits).But as long as these journals were printed, people tolerated the high prices. But now, with the Internet, the publishers have very little costs. The articles are written by scientists. They are also reviewed by other scientists. The editors do

well said. One point of interest to some: When you publish through almost all journals these days, they recognize that the version you submit is yours. The version that is peer reviewed is yours. The version that you give to them for typesetting is theirs once they do said editing, typsetting, printing.

The problem is that with the time and effort it takes to get to the ready to print stage, only a small percentage of papers get 'published' in the pre-typeset form. almost all the info is there as it will be

Engineers and Computer Scientists have this sorted with LaTeX. Others can take advantage of graphical editors for LaTeX like LyX, and generate publication quality manuscripts. The typeset output from the LaTeX IEEE template is not identical to what the IEEE finally typeset, but it is a very close copy. Similarly the Microsoft Word template is pretty good too.

I know many journals only want 'plain text' and then do the typesetting. There is a lot of skill in this and it does cost money. Perhaps if the journals received LaTeX formatted text then the paper could be open access for free? Fat chance.

Open Access is required at my university, and we are required to publish the 'accepted version', but not the 'published version' (with some exceptions). OAKList [qut.edu.au] provides a reference for publication policies.

The typeset output from the LaTeX IEEE template is not identical to what the IEEE finally typeset,

Indeed it isn't. I've published at the IEEE. Do you know, they can't typeset tables? Honestly, it's true. They extract the table from the LaTeX'd document as a very high resolution bitmap and then insert it into their document.

Similarly the Microsoft Word template is pretty good too.

It's a pretty poor approximation. The typesetting in word simply isn't up to the task.

The IEEE also convert nice vector graphic illustrations to bitmap format too:-( The only publications that remain vector are conferences where the authors have to make their own PDFs (and then jump through the IEEE hoops to get it validated). The text in IEEE journals is slightly denser than the LaTeX class. I saved a page on my most recent journal paper and avoided the page charges, so I am happy about that.

IET Journals will take.tex files, but really are after the text. The same goes with Elsevier journ

... The government wanted research that it finances to be available to the public. Your tax money pays for research, therefore you should have access to that research - makes sense, right?... if your taxes pay for research, then you get access to it, no exceptions...

I like to think about possible unintended consequences, consider also applying these ideals to government sponsored source code...

Doesn't the GPL violate the spirit of such open access? It denies some taxpayers the ability to use government funded source code, namely those who would use the taxpayer funded code in a non-GPL project. Shouldn't government funded source code be accessible to both the GPL and BSD communities? Why does a researcher being paid by taxpayers get to decide which taxpayer commun

Because we are given jobs by big university HR departments. They count up "impact factors" and other BS metrics to measure your output. So publishing elsewhere can be a good way to not get your next job.

I'll try to explain it simply:The government finances scientific research, with tax money.That research is conducted by scientists, then other sicentists review the research for flaws, and finally the research is published in scientific journals. Elsevier is the editor of several such journals.

Publisher, not editor.

Elsevier and other publishers do not pay scientists who do research and they do not pay the scientists who review the original research either. They don't pay anybody. They only pay the publication of journals (i.e. printing). And then they sell those journals for a very, very expensive sum of money. I don't have the prices, but it's so expensive that only universities buy these journals (even public libraries can't afford them).So Elsevier and other publishers like them make a ton of money through the work of others.

On the other hand, it does cost quite a bit to print a journal. It's on high-quality paper, not the normal rubbish, and it's done with a very high quality print mechanism. A copy of a journal is supposed to be able to survive for at least a century with only minimal effort at maintenance. A journal paper is for life (and beyond), not just for Christmas.

Which isn't to say that the current situation is right either. Too many rights have been signed over in the past. Prices are not necess

Just FYI, I am trying to write my Masters Thesis from home and so I was trying to look up several research papers that I could use as part of my thesis work. Because I'm not at the school on one of the school's computers or VPN'd into their network, I don't have "free" access to these journals. So I decided to see how much an article would cost to get a copy, thinking they would be around $5-$10 each, but hoping for like a dollar or two(like the cost of a digital manga issue). Much to my surprise, EACH a

Yeah but, you are involved with a university, you should have no problem getting a membership and then cheaper fees or just go all out and get a full repository access.But...why don't you VPN into the network, that's what I did when i wanted stuff from ACM.

I had a friend whose employer had him sign up for classes (which he never attended) at our university, just so he could access journal articles. A few thousand dollars of tuition was far cheaper than the subscription for the engineering jounal they wanted articles from. I don't remember how much he told me that was (it's been a few years) but it was either $30,000 or $60,000.

and it is good to hear it is dead, but on the other hand, the man pulling the strings will most likely be pushing for something else.

Or maybe not.

As in Football, the best Defense is a good Offense.

With the second bill introduced to MANDATE public access, Elsevier [elsevier.com] is now on their heels, trying to defend their turf, and may not have the clout to fight both fronts. They are pretty much going to have to spend their blood and treasure fighting the Federal Research Public Access Act, because if it passes anything they could propose would first have to overcome that hurdle.

A Dutch company trying to dictate publishing policy to the US Governme

Blame it on poor wording. As worded, it reads that the bill would prevent agencies from requiring public access, which would indicate that, had it passed, agencies would not have been able to require public access.

Properly worded, it would have indicated that the bill would have prevented a requirement of public access by government agencies.

now academics are increasingly looking for alternatives to avoid sacking researchers.

GREAT. If you think patenting your research and locking it behind a pay wall is the way to make money then do it. Just don't ask me(the tax payer) to fund it for you. Go, start your own business. You have a PhD you can do this. Put on your big boy pants and stop asking us tax payers to fund your research.

If, on the other hand, you want our help with funding then quit griping and play by OUR rules. If you take our money

When you publish a paper in most peer-reviewed journals, you don't own that paper. A condition to getting published above and beyond the peer-review process is to sign over the copyright to the journal. You pay the publisher to print the article and then have to sign over the copyright. This is allowed to continue in large part because of the "publish or perish" environment in academia. The publishers can then charge excessive fees to access articles.

Federally funded research should be in the public domain unless there's a very good reason it shouldn't be, such as legitimate national security interests. Elsevier is objecting to the FRPAA because mandating open access to federal research would prevent them from hiding it behind copyrights.

The current system is broken in many ways. FRPAA isn't the answer, but it's a step in the right direction.

If the AC is correct, then it's a good fight to make most* tax-payer funded research results public domain.

*However, there ought to be some important caveats. Any legislation which includes the words "all", "always", "never," or "none" should be looked at very carefully. Absolutes are usually not a good thing. Of course, then we have to trust the government when they tell us that this research shouldn't be released due to "National Security," but we pretty much already live in that

If you could keep research paid for by the US tax payers in the public domain for use only by US companies, then I would agree with you, but to make research I paid for... Free for companies/people in other countries to then turn around and use that research on products that get imported to the US is just silly.

We're talking about copyrights, not patents. A copyright doesn't prevent other companies from building on your work, it only prevents them from duplicating your words; they can still read the journal where your research is published.

A patent is what prevents other people from using your ideas in their own inventions.

And copyrights have nothing to do with preventing foreign companies from using the results of research - or do you imagine that those copyrighted journals are available only in the US, cannot be exported, are only able to be read by US citizens, etc?

That was his point - copyrighted or not, others are free to use the results of the research. If you want to prevent that (which as others have pointed out would be astoundingly short-sighted) then you need to patent it (which for pure research may well not ev

Assemble a crew of people from particular fields to make a paper-publishing website. Get a kickstarter going after you have a couple dozen prominent men and women from different scientific fields on board. Start with those fields, grow, and then add more and more fields. As the reputation grows it'll be easier to get other fields to hop on board. In 5-10 years it will be the place to get academic papers published.

This is very probably the result of a widespread boycott of Elsevier started by Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers and other researchers. Supporting RWA was one of the reasons they were fed up with Elsevier.

With help from the hilarious Elfsevier http://twitter.com/#!/Elfsevier and of the bully FakeElsevier http://twitter.com/#!/FakeElsevier who was accused of single handedly bullying a multibillion dollar corporation.

Almost certainly Gowers boycott had a significant effect. Here is a letter that Elsevier posted to the math community today.

A letter to the mathematics community.We are writing to let you know of a series of changes that we are making to how the Elsevier mathematics program will be run. Some of these are new initiatives, and some reflect changes that we have been working on over a longer period.

We have been listening actively to the community and we see a number of issues that we need to address, not least

If people want to keep up with this are aren't, following fakeelsevier on twitter is a humour way to so do.
I for myself am not sure how all this is going to turn out. Publishing is not as expensive as it used to be, and much of the work to publish is essentially funded by grants and unpaid, so there is good arguments to made that publicly funded non profits consortiums can and probably should handle most of the heavy lifting. Libraries receiving a glossy magazine that researchers then have to manually c

The statement "The bill, HR 3699, would have prevented agencies of the federal government from requiring public access to federally subsidized research. " sounds like the bill would have prevented the requirement that federally funded research be public? I must have my head up my ass again...

Yes, I was pretty shocked by that detail as well. Maybe it's because I'm European, but I thought laws were made by lawmakers and, even though companies could be allowed to do some lobbying, the lawmakers were the ones who made the decision based on objective reasoning, like wise men. In reality, apparently, it's companies that decide whether to "support" laws (by buying congressmen to vote for it) or kill them (by buying congressmen to vote against it). It doesn't even appear to strike most slashdot users a